A team of Florida State University researchers has unlocked a decades-old mystery about how a critical cellular process is regulated and what that could mean for the future study of genetics. In cells, DNA and its associated material replicate at regular intervals, a process essential to all living organisms. This contributes to everything from how the body responds to disease to hair color. DNA replication was identified in the late 1950s, but since then researchers across the globe have come up short trying to understand exactly how this process was regulated. Now they know. David Gilbert, the J. Herbert Taylor Distinguished Professor of Molecular Biology, and doctoral student Jiao Sima published a paper today in the journal Cell that showed there are specific points along the DNA molecule that control replication.
"It's been quite a mystery," Gilbert said. "Replication seemed resilient to everything we tried to do to perturb it. We've described it in detail, shown it changes in different cell types and that it is disrupted in disease. But until now, we couldn't find that final piece, the control elements or the DNA sequences that control it." Notably, Gilbert's professorship is in honor of a former Florida State professor named J. Herbert Taylor. Taylor demonstrated how different segments of chromosomes duplicate in the late 1950s and published more than 100 papers on chromosome structure and replication. Roughly 60 years later, Gilbert determined how replication was regulated.